Now with more coherency.

The Coded UI tests in Visual Studio 2010 are pretty cool. For the last few
months I’ve been using the framework to completely automate a sophisticated
web application, with lots of drag and drop and crazy design surfaces.

But the test details page has always looked a little verbose. The default
Debug trace is full of so much stuff that I find it completely unusable, and
what it does have is barely legible anyway. So usually I just collapse the
section and move on to my own less verbose logging and the stack trace.

Unfortunately all this information comes at a bit of a price and I have seen
machines run into the good ol' OutOfMemoryException more than once while
working with the log. So to eliminate that cause from the list of possible
culprits I hit the net and went searching for how to disable the debug trace
in Coded UI Tests.

Unfortunately I didn’t find much (other than how to enable, and usually by
editing the test agent configuration). I wanted to find a solution that I
could add to my solution (damn overloaded words) that would just work no
matter what machine I ran the tests on. Fortunately it was really easy. I just
added an App.config file with the following:

They are all the rage these days. Movies in 3D. Soon it will be hard to see a
movie at a cinema without having to wear those silly glasses. It’s also a new
excuse to add to the ticket price. But in reality it is all just a gimmick,
yes, even for those ultra-gimicky movies like Avatar.

That’s right. I’ve said it. I didn’t really enjoy Avatar. It went on and on
and frankly I’m kind of annoyed that the humans didn’t wipe out the blue guys.
Sure the movie was visually very fancy and there were lots of ooing and ahing
about the 3D visuals (which I agree were spectacular), but in adding the third
dimension to the visuals the movie lost one of the most important dimensions,
substance.

And that’s where the problem really lies. The addition of 3D to the movie
world has just given the movie makers of today yet another distraction from
actually making a good movie. You know, one where you actually care about the
characters.

The other thing that bugs me about movies in 3D is that it can make it very
difficult to focus on what is going on. Although I will give credit to The
Last Airbender which made only very subtle use of 3D and I could actually
read the text when it appeared without straining. Piranha on the other hand
made the text almost impossible to read.

I seriously question the need for presenting films in three dimensions. Movie
makers have been using a simple two dimensional screen for years and doing
just fine. They use lighting, shadows and other fancy tricks to provide the
illusion of depth and when you are caught up in the movie you don’t even
really notice. So I think that’s where the problem really is. In 3D movies all
I notice is that it is in 3D and it becomes harder to recognise and interpret
the story that is actually happening on the screen. It sounds odd, but I find
it harder to actually immerse myself in a 3D film.

I suppose one big reason the studios might be pushing for more 3D film
releases apart from the increased ticket prices is that it might be a way to
thwart some camcorder piracy of their movies. Although It would probably be
fairly simple to put a filter on the camera so that’s probably a stupid
reason.

And if the kids out there want to really play with the whole three dimensional
thing, I suggest placing two objects one behind the other. Close one eye and
line up your sight so that the back object is obscured. Now alternately close
and open each eye. It’s like magic.

Recently a Google Chrome update removed the ‘http://’ from the Omnibox (aka the
address/search bar). When the change was originally introduced in the development branch
of Google Chrome in April this year there was massive backlash (~150 comments on a bug,
specifically Bug 41467). Of course within about 5 days the comments died down and
everyone moved on with their lives. The Chromium team have marked the ‘bug’ as ‘Won’t
fix’.

Now the feature has hit the main release. If you still aren’t sure what I’m talking about,
here’s a screenshot:

Personally I like the change, and here’s why:

Copy and Paste use cases still work (at least they do on my machine).

Because I read left to right I don’t have to skip 7 characters to get to the domain name.

I consider my browser to be primarily an HTTP client. I expect HTTP to be the default protocol and don’t need this information exposed.

My own personal biases.

Of course, HTTPS urls display differently.

So this could be a little confusing, but it does further highlight the fact
that the connection is secured.

Nevertheless one of the reasons I do include Chrome as part of my browser
cycle is because it is different. This change is different from the other
browsers, but it is exactly this difference that I like.

Have you noticed that your Visual Studio test lists always seem to get re-
ordered? Make sense of this randomness with the VSMDI Normalizer.

It works by sorting your test lists and tests by name, creating a consistent
ordering, allowing better merging and comparison of test lists. It’s a command
line tool so it can integrate with automated processes really well.

It works in two modes:

Target Mode: Specify the VSMDI file as the first argument and the target output file as the second. If the target exists it will be overwritten. This is ideal if not everyone is using VSMDI Normalizer. Some file comparison tools accept external converter tools (such as Beyond Compare).

In Place Mode: The VSMDI file will be normalized in place. This would be a good operation to run prior to check in. Just specify the VSMDI file as the first and only argument at the command line.

I recently installed Windows 7 RTM on my laptop. Knowing that Asus didn’t
supply 64-bit drivers for my laptop I installed the 32-bit version. After all,
I only had 2GiB of RAM anyway.

Working from home the last few weeks has put more stress on my laptop than it
has previously and I was constantly hitting my 2GiB limit leaving my hard
drive thrashing as Windows struggled to swap pages in and out of memory.

I was surprised when I installed Windows 7 that I didn’t need to download any
drivers from my manufacturer (Asus). My graphics drivers were installed
through Windows Update and everything else worked out of the box.
((Unfortunately this didn’t include my Bluetooth drivers, but as I am now
using the Microsoft Explorer Mouse this doesn’t seem like such a loss.))

So, after some encouragement from a friend on twitter I
decided to try installing the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and if it worked,
move up to 4GiB of RAM.

I already had the 64-bit image ready to go on Windows Deployment Services, but
I had just recently finished setting up my machine perfectly. I was
particularly worried about having to reconfigure Outlook and set up new PST
file. Now I could have tried copying my user profile and transferring that
way, but instead I figured that I’d give Windows Easy Transfer a try. Once I
passed the initial welcome screen I was confronted with the following options:

I guess this is a good idea for people who don’t have a wired home network. I
didn’t have one of these cables (and I don’t think looping it back to the same
computer would work right) so I moved to the next option.

Surely this was the option I wanted. After all, I wanted to copy the files to
my network server. Unfortunately, no. This option migrates directly to the new
computer. This wasn’t right either.

An external hard disk or USB flash drive? That sounds very specific.
Fortunately this includes network drives too. In fact, it just brings up a
standard file dialog so you could likely store the migration file anywhere you
want.

Then it was just a case of following the on-screen directions. It not only
backed up the Documents folder, but it grabbed other folders on the disk and
on different partitions. Unfortunately it doesn’t grab the settings for all
applications, but it covered enough for my needs.

Once you’ve migrated back you get this handy migration report which you can
use as a guide to see what applications you still have to install: